Love and Other Ways of Dying (31 page)

Then the earth got bigger. Green spots became tamarind trees; brown dots became tukels, thatched huts scattered in groups of three and four—some of them burned out, some bombed, some lopsided and listing. Purple forms blurred through the bush.

Now the Buffalo hit the ground, bouncing down a potholed dirt track. You went back into the long, dark cave of the cargo hold, moving on automatic, and suddenly the hatch was thrown open. What hit you was roaring and mean, beams of bright light and a 120-degree blowtorch of heat that incinerated your breath just as it was leaving your lungs, so it seemed to come out of you like fire. What hit you was the smell of Africa, the dust and sweat and burned urine and sun-scorched blades of elephant grass.

Everyone took a step back when you jumped down, as if you were an alien, dust rising when your booted feet hit the earth near their naked ones, your body inadvertently hunched in ready position as if you were back at school on the wrestling mat. And then there was that weird microsecond when your eyes rose up, your head craned skyward. To these men who just kept growing! You looked up at them, these men. And they looked down at you. And you looked up at them. And they at you again.

Until a hand came through the air. Big peace, a voice said in another tongue. Big peace, said Jason Matus without hesitation, putting a hand back through the air. And the hands met there—one the blackest of black, one the whitest of pale white. Like shaking hands with midnight; like shaking hands with goat’s milk. And the man held on to you, Jason Matus, and led you away from the plane, into his world now, and the crowd parted, these amazing faces, hollowed with high cheekbones, super-white eyeballs and teeth, foreheads scarred with tribal markings, bodies clean of
hair. You didn’t even notice their ribs at first, the ballooned bellies and the bloated hands. At first, you didn’t notice what the Dinka simply call the Hunger, though that’s what you had come for. Just saw their faces, made sure you met their smiles and gazes. And then all those hands reaching for you. Men in sky-blue djellaba gowns fluttering from their stick-thin bodies like loose sails.
Mali madit.
Big peace, my brother.

Suddenly everything you once knew—well, it didn’t matter here in southern Sudan. You were walking into one of the all-time great fucked-up situations on this earth. Famine. Drought. Genocide. For most of the last fifty years, a civil war had been raging between the Muslim government in Khartoum and its militias and then the Christian tribes and Ph.D. rebel leaders of the south, all chasing one another around with AK-47s, trying to blow one another’s heads off. And millions of innocents running, too, fleeing from rape and slave raids and murder, escaping with nothing but their own skin and bones, set loose across the whole wide expanse of barren flatland like crippled giraffes. Hundreds of thousands dying from the Hunger.

The victims—but they were smiling when you jumped out of that Buffalo. Each hand you touched—it was as if you were being pulled from a fast current of water. So who was strong and who was weak here? Who needed help, anyway? You were young, though not altogether innocent. Tough, but one hour in this sun and you were lobster red. You’d backpacked for nearly three years. Out there in the world—eating at roadside stands in India and bazaars in Morocco, surfing in Sri Lanka, drinking the bad water, going native, wearing sarongs and hippie beads and dreadlocks. Yes, it was a phase, but wonderful how no one cared who your daddy was or where you’d gone to school. No, you started with only two things out there. Name and nationality. Jason Matus, American.

You were on a secret journey, a pilgrimage to find your true
self by abandoning the comforts of home, by throwing over who you were supposed to be. When you were sick—amoebic dysentery, malaria—you lay in bed in faraway youth hostels, fasting, dizzy with fever, listening to the ocean and the voices in Arabic or Hindi or some language you’d never heard before drifting up to your window. When you were in Nepal, you trekked into the Himalayas without knowing where you were going, searching for epiphany, and then almost froze in your epiphany at eighteen thousand feet. When you read a book about the medicinal benefits of drinking your own urine, you drank your pee every day for eight months because—well, you sound like a madman now—because you thought it would make you whole, make you strong, give you back some essence of yourself that you’d somehow squandered for so many years.

But what were you looking for out there in the world, anyway? What did you
want
? One thing: to match your words with your deeds. That was it: Marry the thought, the word, and the action. Make it one single reflex based on good intention. In this big world of hurt, you thought you could make a difference. Be one pure, unalloyed thing. A place of refuge. Shelter. Like, Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses. Give them to
me
, man.

So here you go, hombre. Welcome to the Sudan, to civil war, to these naked kids crawling in the dirt at your feet, covered in flies, too spent to swat them away. Welcome to sleeping beneath trees, the ground so hot at midnight your T-shirt is soaked, then waking to twenty hovering faces, more Dinka kids touching your hair. And here’s to shitting in shallow holes, no running water, and never-ending days in the brutal sun. Here’s to wondering if that distant thunder happens to be bombs from government Antonovs or if those nightly gunshots—what you will come to call “a little night music”—mean it’s time to get up and run.

No, this wasn’t some Sally Struthers late-night commercial, this was the real thing. This was one rebel group killing people at a food drop and spilling their blood over sacks of sorghum. This was coworkers getting shot and killed, land-mined and kidnapped. This was guinea worm and Ebola and sleeping sickness and about five other nameless diseases that could liquidate you instantly. And this finally was eight, nine, ten thousand dying people at an airdrop, standing right smack on the big white
X
, and you, Jason Matus, trying to clear them before the cargo plane appeared, before it released fifteen tons of maize or high-energy biscuits from eight hundred feet, just slid it down rollers on pallets and let it waterfall out the back hatch of the plane. The Dinka—and other tribes in the south, the Nuer and Luo—seemed only to half understand the danger of getting pancaked by a pallet loaded with 110-pound bags of maize. They held their hands out, mimicking a bird, smiling at you. Didn’t they understand that one mishandled toggle would send fifteen tons down on their heads? That thought drove you through the crowd like a lunatic, shoving and yelling and then looking up at the sky for some sign of the plane.
Jetki rot!
Move! Get back! Did you hear me? Pick up and get back!

And then later, soaked with sweat, taking refuge in the shade of a tamarind tree, you watched the glory of that first food drop, helped command it with the radio in your hand. “Whiskey Whiskey to UN Foxtrot 12, clear to drop.” A powerful thing, to see that dolphin-nosed aircraft marked WFP—World Food Programme—appearing out of nowhere, roaring from Kenya across the great nothingness of southern Sudan. Like the cavalry riding in. Its contrail like an umbilical cord. The hatch lowering and then the food—just awesome the way it poured out into all that light and space and sky, like the loaves and the fishes. Beautiful, the way the sacks speckled the air, each one full of good Kansas
corn, and hit the ground with a thud and then, as if they were full of living bodies, turned somersaults. On this afternoon, there seemed to be nothing but big peace and three hundred somersaulting sacks of maize!

Still, you knew nothing yet. You came across that field, a magic man with hairy arms who’d perhaps conjured a big bird to feed the Dinka. Yes, for a few of them, you were the prophet fulfilling the prophecy. When the porters had removed nearly all the food and stacked it neatly beneath a tree, you went into the field to inspect, to make sure all the maize from the broken bags had been scooped up. The sun was in your eyes, and you didn’t notice the ten thousand people lining the edge of the field. You didn’t notice the first wave of them, or the second, or the third, until it was too late. They were stampeding toward you—sprinting, yelling, rioting. Hunchbacks and women with shriveled breasts; clubfoots and bloated children waving empty gourd bowls. Their faces twisted in pain, their eyes bloodshot and wild. Like some kind of nightmare. They came for you, but then they didn’t even touch you. They dove into the dirt at your feet; people were scrounging against one another for the few leftover kernels of maize, clawing the earth with their fingernails, bickering and breathing as one mass. So thin you could see the underworkings of their bodies, see right to their beating hearts.

And you—you just stood there, frozen, the hairs on the back of your neck straight up. You watched their fingers work the dirt, the curled-over kids gobbling raw kernels, hair yellowed from the Hunger. Even today, five years later, after five years in the Sudan, at the wise age of thirty, you still remember towering over them, holding yourself in until you couldn’t anymore, until you thought you might be losing it. No, my brother, you didn’t know anything until that moment, knew nothing at all about your place in this world until you—Jason Matus, American—stood among the people and were rendered completely invisible.

So wake now in Lorton, Virginia, invisible. Wake in this forty-five-year-old body with a walrus mustache, your waist thickening, skin loosening, the whole fleshy ornament of you beginning to schlump earthward. Rise in this cramped, brick two-bedroom among other cemented-together brick houses in a perfectly bland brick subdivision on a busy thoroughfare. Feel your way down the dark halls of your cramped brick house, past the photographs of your family—your wife, the teacher’s aide; your teenage son with the blinding fastball—to the kitchen with flowered wallpaper and linoleum floor. Drink coffee at the oak table you refinished yourself, sitting in a pool of one-hundred-watt light, and then head out the door for the one-hour bus ride to Washington, D.C., to the old Annex II building and your job in the Congressional Budget Office. Like every day. Like every day before and every day after.

This is the grind, your nine–to–five-thirty as a low-level government bureaucrat. Your life of put-on-the-same-old-clothes and take-the-same-bus and drink-the-same-bad-coffee and unjam-the-same-damn-Xerox-machine. Like, Do we have enough Bic pens around here? See, you’re nobody. Or you’re everybody—but either way, you’re invisible. Just another guy. The anonymous Joe up in the grandstand, hot dog in mouth, proudly watching his son pitch goose eggs into the seventh inning. Invisible—which is why sometimes January 13, 1982, feels like a dream, as if it all happened to another Lenny Skutnik who wasn’t you, who wasn’t twenty-nine then, with a newborn baby. That day, like every day, you woke, rose, and stumbled down the dark hall. You drank coffee. On the radio, clouds, some snow in the forecast. You were thinking: Snow? C’mon, this is D.C. You carpooled with your father, Marty, and some coworkers. At the office, you did the usual. Checked the copy machines, delivered
the mail. Ate lunch in the cafeteria, a club sandwich, and every once in a while stole a look out the window.

By early afternoon, the snow was so thick it seemed as if the moon itself had blown up, was coming down in woolly clumps. Everything falling out of the sky but car fenders. Seemed impossible, but all federal workers were let out early. And suddenly you were heading back to the brick subdivision to shovel the walk. Some warm soup and television on the couch. Home sweet home.

But no. The interstate was snarled, a bumper-to-bumper crawl. Took one hour to get one mile. High drifts on the ground. Then, around 4:00
P
.
M
., just as the light began to drain from the sky, you came to a full stop before the Fourteenth Street Bridge, just off the main runway of National Airport. There was a commotion; people were out of their cars, looking over the guardrail at the frozen Potomac. People began working their way down the embankment by the bridge, slipping and sliding—something urgent—and you followed them in that silver light, with bits of the moon falling on your head. You weren’t sure why, but you followed them down with your father and the other guys in your car. Your understanding of this came retroactively—all these people in the snow, running—as if you were speed-reading a story.

In the river were six people—splashing, fighting for air, trying to hang on to the tail of Air Florida flight 90, scheduled from Washington to Tampa. The plane had lumbered slowly down the tarmac on takeoff, banked hard left, and just couldn’t raise itself up in the air, fighting all that icy downfall. Skimmed the Fourteenth Street Bridge, took off several car roofs, decapitated a few drivers, knocked over a truck, then crashed through the ice and vanished. About seventy people were already on the river bottom, buckled fast to their seats. Never had a chance, those people. Never got the flight magazine out of the seat pocket or moved
on to the peanuts-and-soft-drinks portion of this beautiful, sad life. Swallowed whole by the Potomac.